We have all read about The Toddler and his efforts to raise dollar after dollar for only-god-knows-what. From sales taxes to bonds to loans, his appetite for income and reluctance to deal with inefficiencies and cronyism would be unbelievable if this were a Hollywood movie. Over at CBS News there is a 60 Minutes report on severe changes at University Medical Center in Las Vegas. This is not about imposing effeciencies, we are talking total shutdown of services. I can imagine the Toddler using a similar situation to try and suck more money out the taxpaying populace. What will it take to move him out of perpetual fund raising mode and into actual effective management of resources?
Ok, I know, I am asking for the moon, the sun and the stars. I can't help it. I do know I don't want to see this happening at Cook County Hospital.
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Until the citizenry of Cook County and the rest of the country awakens to realization of the costs of corruption, we can expect further deterioration of vital services with an increasing drain on our money and calls for evermore taxes.
Ask anybody, anywhere in the U.S. almost, which is the most corrupt municipality in the U.S., and they will almost unfailingly name the one they live in.
We take corruption almost as a given. I mean, it's EXPECTED, it's just the cost of doing business, it's just life as far as most people are concerned. Most feel that you might as well try to repeal the law of gravity as try to root it out.
And I don't know where to start anymore than anyone else does, because the usual response, difficult enough to manage, which is to vote the suckers out- usually results only in the installation of another crowd of leaches.
It would take a groundswell of public discontent and anger combined with a widespread willingness to take really decisive action, and it might take a leap beyond "due process" to accomplish it. Is this the feeling that triggers violent upheavals? I'm the last person in the world to take any action that could result in the kind of disorder and violence that always comes with revolutions, but sometimes you wonder if that isn't the only way to accomplish any change in the system.
The trouble is, revolutions usually only accomplish short term "change" at best, and at unbearable costs, including tens of thousands to millions of dead bodies, most of them innocent, and the complete destruction of the civil order we all rely upon to make our day to day lives livable.
And I don't take that order for granted. It is very fragile and we have enough threats to it looming on the horizon as it is. A shortage of essential commodities could topple it, and render life completely untenable for most people
I guess we'll just have to settle for upheaval at the polls, if ever we could accomplish even that. And, of course, the biggest obstacle there will be our fellow sleepwalking citizens, who don't even bother to show up at the polls half the time.
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